About
Harmonic Space Orchestra (HSO) is a Berlin-based ensemble of musicians specialising in research and performance of rational or just intonation (JI), focussing on connections between resonance, psychoacoustics and collaboration. HSO brings together the knowledge and practices of leading experts in the field of microtonality to form a uniquely accomplished ensemble dedicated entirely to working with and investigating harmonic sound.
The cornerstone of HSO’s work is a weekly workshop where members meet to collectively explore exercises, materials, and repertoire. Working collaboratively to develop and expand their core pursuits, members fluidly move between different musical roles (composer/performer/improviser/producer/listener) without falling into conventional hierarchies. This experimental, practice-based research has been ongoing since 2019. Over time, their unique methods have developed a shared vocabulary to approach ensemble intonation as a relational practice, one that foregrounds listening, social negotiation, and nuanced mutual understanding as core tenets of its practice.
Recent festival performances include MIXTUR (ES), hcmf// (UK), AFEKT (ES/DE), Edition (SE) and riverrun (FR). Other projects include a collaboration with Tashi Wada (US) for the American Academy in Berlin as well as premieres of new works by members of the ensemble and composers such as Cenk Ergün (TR/US) at their long-running “Prime Time” series at KM28 (Berlin). In 2020, HSO presented Harmonic Space 2020: James Tenney, a four-day festival of music and visuals by and connected to James Tenney. HSO has released works by members Catherine Lamb and Marc Sabat on the Sacred Realism label.
M.O. Abbott
M.O. Abbott is a Berlin-based composer, trombonist, music educator, and researcher. His creative foci include computer-assisted algorithmic composition, microtonality, just intonation, electroacoustic composition, and contemporary music performance. M.O.’s work has recently been heard at festivals and conferences including Ostrava Days (Czech Republic), ICMC (Shanghai, Daegu, New York), Diffrazioni (Firenze), the SCI National Conference (USA), the SEAMUS National Conference (USA), and New Music on the Point (USA). Along with pianist Whitney Ashe, M.O. was awarded the 19th Annual 21st Century Piano Commission. He has also been recognized with a Presser Graduate Music Award. M.O. holds a B.M. from Eastman School of Music and a M.M. from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (an alma mater of James Tenney), where his primary composition instructor was Sever Tipei. He has also studied composition and intonation with Marc Sabat. His primary trombone instructors include Mark Lawrence and Jim Pugh.
Ellen Arkbro
Ellen Arkbro (b. 1990) is a composer, organist and trumpet player from Stockholm currently living and working in Berlin. She works with precision-tuned intervallic harmony. Her work includes compositions for acoustic instruments and for synthetic sound, and for combinations of both. In all of her work, Arkbro focuses on the qualities of harmonic sound that reveal listening as an active process of creative participation, inviting the listener to gradually transform into the sound itself.
Sam Dunscombe
Sam Dunscombe is a performer-composer who uses clarinets, computers, and microphones. Sam is interested in work that explores the multi-dimensional perception of time, which has drawn them to areas including improvisation, the performance of complex-notated repertoire, field recording, audio engineering, and live electronic performance. Sam has collaborated with a wide range of artists, from Anthony Pateras to Eva-Maria Houben; Taku Sugimoto to Iancu Dumitrescu and Ana-Maria Avram; Richard Barrett to Cat Lamb; Pierluigi Billone to Klaus Lang; Jim O’Rourke to The Necks. Performances include Maerzmusik (Berlin), Tokyo Experimental Festival, World Music Days (Ljubljana), Tectonics (Athens; Tel Aviv), Kontraklang (Berlin), the Melbourne, Sydney, and Adelaide International Arts Festivals (Australia), Ftarri Festival (Japan), and others. Sam works as the archivist to the estate of Horatiu Radulescu, and is the assistant editor for Lucero Print, where they work to digitise, revise, and make available to the public Radulescu’s substantial catalogue of works.
Judith Hamann
Judith Hamann is a performer and composer from Narrm/Birraranga (Melbourne), “one of Australia’s foremost contemporary-music cellists” (RealTime Arts). Her current work focuses on an examination of ‘shaking’ in her solo performance practice, the creation of new work for cello and humming, and a research based project ‘Materialities of Realisation’ (with Charles Curtis). Hamann has worked with artists including Dennis Cooper, Anthony Davis, Sarah Hennies, Yvette Janine Jackson, Áine O’Dwyer, Alvin Lucier, Eliane Radigue, Tashi Wada, and La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela. She has performed widely at festivals including the LA Philharmonic Fluxus Festival (Los Angeles), Sonic Acts (Amsterdam), Tectonics (Glasgow, Adelaide, Athens), Tokyo Experimental Festival (Tokyo), AURAL (Mexico City), SiDance Festival (Seoul). Hamann has performed or composed music released on labels including Saltern, Pogus, Another Timbre, Black Truffle, and Marginal Frequency and holds a Doctor of Musical Arts from University of California, San Diego, where she majored in contemporary cello performance.
Jonathan Heilbron
Jonathan Heilbron is an Australian composer and performer active in the fields of contemporary, improvised and experimental music. As an interpreter of contemporary music, Jonathan has performed as a soloist and with ensembles across Australia, Europe, North and South America, Asia and the Middle East. He has performed with Klangforum Wien, Apartment House, the Munich Chamber Orchestra, Kammerensemble Neue Musik Berlin, and Ensemble Soundinitiative Paris. Through these engagements, he has worked directly with composers such as G.F. Haas, Catherine Lamb, Klaus Lang, Younghi Pagh-Paan, Jennifer Walshe, Christian Wolff, and Bernhard Lang, and has commissioned several new works from emerging composers. Recordings of Jonathan's compositions have been released by Another Timbre (UK), Insub (Switzerland), Intonema (Russia), and inexhaustible editions (Slovenia).
Catherine Lamb
Catherine Lamb is an active composer exploring the interaction of tone, summations of shapes and shadows, phenomenological expansions, states between outside/inside, empathy, and the long introduction form. She currently resides in Berlin where she composes, teaches, and collaborates within the community (including the co-initiated Harmonic Space Orchestra).
Rebecca Lane
Rebecca Lane is a performer-composer who explores intonation as a social and perceptual practice, focusing on just/rational intonation and the relational aspects of sounding/activating this material with others. Her practice is informed by ongoing relationships with composers (such as Catherine Lamb), collaborations (including Clara de Asís) and within various duos and ensembles (including the co-initiated Harmonic Space Orchestra and Asterales), utilizing various flutes (in particular, Kingma System quarter-tone flutes). Residencies include GMEA (FR), Q-O2 (BE), Goethe-Institut (DE) and a Villa Massimo German Academy Rome Fellowship, Casa Baldi (DE/IT). Recent recording projects include Jacob Ullmann’s Solo I/Solo IV with Jon Heilbron for Another Timbre, Distances Bending with Clara de Asís on Discreet editions and works by Laura Steenberge for Sacred Realism. Born in Naarm (Melbourne), Australia, Rebecca has been active in Berlin’s experimental music scene since 2011.
Thomas Nicholson
Thomas Nicholson is a Berlin-based Canadian composer working with just intonation. His practice explores ways of bridging rigorous theoretical research with intuitive experimentation. Since 2014, his compositions have focused on inherently microtonal qualities of just intonation. His work often grows out of his interests in mathematics, physics, psychoacoustics, music history, graphic design and philosophy. He especially enjoys composing for smaller settings consisting of two to four musicians. Beyond composing, he develops tools and pedagogical materials that address both the conceptual and practical challenges of writing and performing microtonal music with acoustic instruments.
Michiko Ogawa
Michiko Ogawa is a performer-composer specialising in the clarinet, born and raised in Tokyo, Japan. She performs not only classical repertoire but also contemporary and experimental musics, including free improvisation and film soundtrack work. Michiko Ogawa has appeared at the Tokyo Experimental Festival (2013), Darmstadt summer music festival (2016), Supersense Festival of Ecstatic Music (2015), the Monday Evening Concert series (Los Angeles, 2016), WasteLAnd (Los Angels, 2016), Inland series (Melbourne, 2015, 2016), BIFEM (Bendigo, Australia 2016, 2017, 2019), Maerzmusik (Berlin, 2018, 2019) and Brisbane International Film Festival (2018), Ftarri Festival (2019) among others. She has worked with composers including Toshi Ichiyanagi, Helmut Lachenmann, Richard Barrett, Hunjoo Jung, Catherine Lamb and Chikako Morishita, and with performers including Charles Curtis, Anthony Burr, Erik Carlson, Greg Stuart, Vicki Ray, among others. She also has been collaborating with musicians Sam Dunscombe, Taku Sugimoto, James Rushford, Carolyn Chen, Manuel Lima, Johnny Chang and Klaus Lang among others She also frequently collaborates with visual artists, such Angela Jennings, Lindsay Bloom, Brianna Rigg and Sabina Maselli.
Weston Olencki
Weston Olencki is a musician, composer, and sound artist from South Carolina, living and working in Berlin. Their current work is centered around questions of instrumental music and its contexts and constructs, various mediated practices of listening and improvisation, and the technological, material, and cultural histories of vernacular space/time/music. They have presented work at the Borealis Festival, philharmonie luxembourg, Black Mountain College, Donaueschinger Musiktage, Festival Musica, the American Academy in Rome, Roulette Intermedium, the Jalopy Theatre, and was awarded the Kranichsteiner Musikpreis from the 2016 Darmstadt Ferienkurse. Various recording projects have been released by HatHut, Out of Your Head, Tripticks Tapes, Sound American, Carrier, New Amsterdam, Clean Feed, Lobby Art, Dinzu Artefacts, SUPERPANG, Notice Recordings, and more. They are an active member of RAGE THORMBONES, Ensemblekollektiv Berlin, Clone Decay (with Mary Halvorson & Kalia Vandever), The Hollows (with Nick Dunston & Etienne Nillesen), and perform regularly as a soloist and ensemble member on low brass instruments, winds, banjo, organs, and various electronic media.
Lucy Railton
Emerging from a long-term engagement with contemporary music the British, Berlin based musician Lucy Railton is active as both a performer in new music and improvisation, and writes her own music for cello, electronics and field recordings, releasing solo records on the labels Editions Mego/GRM and Modern Love, and in collaboration with Peter Zinovieff on PAN. She has been involved in a diverse range of projects over years, most recently with those lead by Rhodri Davies, Kit Downes, Blank Forms, Beatrice Dillon and Kali Malone and as a member of the Ever Present Orchestra, Ensemble Contrechamps and the Harmonic Space Orchestra. Originally from London, she established the 10 year long series Kammer Klang at Cafe Oto and co-founded the London Contemporary Music Festival in 2013. Residencies include EMS, Sweden and Dark Ecologies/Sonic Acts Norway and commissions by Somerset House, London and INA GRM, Paris.
Fredrik Rasten
Fredrik Rasten (born 1988) is a guitarist and composer based in Oslo and Berlin. He is primarily focusing on the musical possibilities within just intonation and related sound phenomena, and in his work he is reaching for an actively listening state wherein to intuitively explore the complexities of tone and harmony. On the guitar he is applying real time retuning of the instrument, vocal shadings and different preparations to create warm and fluctuating resonances. As a composer he is mostly creating music for smaller groups, where the ongoing exploration of pitch relations is guiding the work, while also finding inspiration in early music, folk traditions and reductionist / silent expressions. Other elements influencing his work include ideas of music as social, non-hierarchical practices, and essential philosophical conundrums, such as the elusive relationship between mind and matter. He has collaborated with musicians such as Catherine Lamb, Antoine Beuger, Marc Sabat, Taku Sugimoto, Andrea Neumann, Magda Mayas, Christian Wallumrød and Alasdair Roberts, and has toured extensively in Europe and Russia with the long-term groups Oker, Pip and Arches. Rasten's recording output has been published on labels such as SOFA, Edition Wandelweiser, Ftarri and Shhpuma.
Marc Sabat
Canadian composer of Ukrainian descent Marc Sabat (*1965) has been based in Berlin since 1999. He makes pieces for concert and installation settings, drawing inspiration from ongoing research about the sounding and perception of Just Intonation. He relates his practice to various music forms—folk,experimental and classical. In collaborations with others he seeks points of shared exploration and dialogue between different modes of experience and cultural traditions. Largely self-taught as a composer, Sabat studied violin at the University of Toronto, at the Juilliard School in New York, and computer music at McGill University, as well as working privately with Malcolm Goldstein, James Tenney and Walter Zimmermann, among others. With Wolfgang von Schweinitz he developed the Extended Helmholtz-Ellis JI Pitch Notation and is a pioneer of instrumental music written and performed in microtonal Just Intonation. In 2000, he co-founded the Plainsound Music Edition website, conceived as a curated, interdisciplinary virtual artists’ edition. Sabat’s work is played internationally. He teaches composition and the theory and practice of intonation at the Universität der Künste Berlin. Together with colleagues Catherine Lamb and Rebecca Lane he formed the Harmonic Space Orchestra in 2019.